


A Chat With An Igneous Geologist

by BainAduial



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, anthropomorphization of rocks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 17:19:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1718426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BainAduial/pseuds/BainAduial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I had the opportunity the other day to sit down for a chat with an igneous geologist...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Chat With An Igneous Geologist

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes your brain wanders during archaeology lectures and you doodle pink unicorns. And then sometimes, it wanders and you end up with THIS. I don't even know.

I had the opportunity this afternoon to sit down for a chat with an igneous geologist. 

Now, seeing as I myself am an archaeologist trained in the North American style – anthropological and scientific, as opposed to the history-oriented Brits and the poor sods from the Continent who get lumped in with the sociologists – and my specialty is Paleolithic Africa, this isn’t such an unusual occurrence.

Actually, even without that, it wouldn’t be an unusual occurrence. It isn’t that hard to find an igneous geologist, really. Especially if you travel in scientific or academic circles.

All of this is beside the point. I had the opportunity to sit down, while on a dig somewhere in the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya, and speak with an igneous geologist. A large number of the sites we find in Africa, especially those dating back to earlier forms of hominids, are datable only because of the volcanic material they rest in. Africa is one of the most volcanic areas on the planet. Africa is a bit of a throwback to an earlier time, really, and in some ways almost makes you feel as if you’re a member of one of those early hominid species while you’re working there. But I digress again.

This particular igneous geologist – name of Fred, actually – wasn’t quite like anybody else I’d ever met. Had some interesting thoughts. I figure it came from sitting out there on the lava flows for so long; I’ve met some archaeologists who’re like that. Spend too long staring at million-year-old skeletal remains – if you can find skeletal remains, and not just shards in the dirt – and you get a little batty. I knew exactly how many sites Fred had been to, and how long was spent at each one sitting out of the way on interesting rock formations. Like me, Fred changed specializations every so often as interest took.

So there we were, in the heat of a Kenyan afternoon, sitting on a ridge while everyone else takes their own breaks. It’s just too hot to work through the day here. Pretty soon I’ll go in for a nap, and we’ll pick it up when the sun isn’t quite so high and work through the evening. It’s not such a bad way to run a dig. When I was an undergraduate, working on Native American sites in my native western Canada, and later on some of the South American – Maya, Aztec, Inca, I’ve seen them all – we often worked through the day. I like the mid-day break we get here a lot better. Work goes faster with it. Re-introduce the tradition of the siesta, that’s what I say!

“So geology,” I say to begin, because someone has to say something.

“Geology,” Fred says back. A very grating voice, Fred has. “Archaeology?”

“Archaeology,” I confirm. “Early Stone Age ethno-archaeology, actually.”

“Ah. Igneous formation processes,” Fred tells me. 

“Ah. What’s that like, then?” I ask, always on the lookout for new knowledge, although I’ve had a number of courses in geology over the years. Sort of necessary, to know what you’re digging through.

“Hot,” Fred answers. “It involves lava, you know.”

I know. “Just hot?”

“And fast. Igneous are fast, as rocks go. Take a good sedimentary, now, sedimentary rocks need thousands of years. They just keep building up, silt and pressure and silt and pressure until finally you have a rock. Igneous, though, they come out molten, and then they just cool off and you have a rock, right there.”

“That’s fast,” I agree. “Humans aren’t so fast.”

“They are when compared with rocks,” Fred disagreed. “Take you. You’re sitting here, studying your ancestors, who you consider a completely different species. Homo erectus to your Homo sapiens, and all that.” Fred, I thought, could have a very British turn of phrase. “And you’re not more than a million years away from them. Two million, at the outside. But rocks? Rocks don’t evolve. You get new rocks, old rocks wear away to dust, rocks get squished into new rocks, but it’s the same rocks made of the same silt and molten material that were here when the whole world was an ocean. It was rocks that came up out of the water first, and yet here you are, the end of a long evolutionary process that started with rocks, looking at your recently-dead – geologically speaking – ancestors from a position of having conquered the planet.”

I blinked. “I never thought about it that way. You think rocks should be the dominant species on the planet?”

“Would they do better?” Fred asked. I wasn’t sure if he was joking. “Sedimentary would take too long to decide anything. I’m not sure they’d ever be able to get beyond a certain point. They only think about themselves; what are they made of, what brought them to this place, what are these little things inside them and who did they used to belong to. They like those questions, but they never look up, never look outside themselves to see that they’re part of a larger whole. Besides, there aren’t enough of them. They’re spread thin, just the icing on the earth’s crust.”

“Well, they do hold rich deposits of artifacts and bones, knowledge, things that tell us about our own past,” I defended the sedimentary layers – through which I have spent much of my time digging – faithfully.

“Archaeologists are sedimentary,” Fred claimed then. “But let’s move on. What do you know about metamorphic rock?”

“Very little,” I admitted. “It doesn’t come up much in my studies.”

“Ah, but metamorphic rock is important. It makes up most of the earth’s crust. It goes through intense heat and pressure to become metamorphic, after a long life as an igneous or sedimentary is finished.”

“And how do they think?” I asked.

“Faster. They’ve had more time to wake up and look around. But they’re so important. They can’t look up, so see the world they support. They’re too busy looking down, making sure the fault lines behave, and the crust doesn’t shift. They’re too important to bother themselves with what the other creatures are doing, the ones that crawl around on their backs. They’re too big for that. So we leave them alone, and let them get on with their weighty subjects.”

“Fascinating,” I murmured. “So the sedimentary rocks couldn’t get involved because they only care about themselves, and the metamorphic won’t get involved because they care too much about everybody else, in a general sort of way. But what about the igneous rocks?”

“Ah,” Fred said again. “Igneous are interesting. You see, the igneous rocks come in two varieties. One is from deep molten activity, and the other is from surface molten activity. You can always date an igneous rock; you can’t in quite the same way with the other two. So igneous don’t need to spend much time wondering where they’re from, or what they’re made of. They know. And even the deep ones are close enough to the surface that the weight of the world isn’t resting on them. Igneous have more time, and grow and learn faster. Some igneous have been expelled from their volcanoes fast and hard enough to be able to study the atmosphere and the stars before hominids were walking upright; some were able to study the ancient marine animals before they evolved into air-breathers. Igneous go everywhere and learn everything.”

“So why couldn’t the igneous dominate?” I asked, curious now. 

Fred made a funny clacking sound. “They flit. From subject to subject, interest to interest. They’d never get organized enough. Let’s turn this around. You study early hominids. What do you think made them the dominant species on the planet? Long before these new machines, long before Homo sapiens mastered air travel and ocean travel. Why did they grow to be dominant, in the face of older, more experienced life?”

I thought for a minute. One thing I always liked about Fred; Fred gave you time to think. “I don’t know,” I answered finally. “There are as many theories on that as there are Homo sapiens to ask.”

“And that is why,” Fred answered. “Because you look into yourselves, to ask who you are and where you are from. You look into your past. You look beneath you, to order the world and to make sure it doesn’t fall apart. And you look up, to the stars, to the oceans, to learn all that you can learn.”

I blinked. “You’re right, Fred,” I said. “We do, don’t we?”

Fred, though, didn’t answer. I guess that was all I was going to hear for today. I couldn’t blame Fred; I was interrupting a careful study of the nearby lava-flow. Even when not working, neither of us could resist studying things more closely. Fred wasn’t from this part of the world any more than I was.

Point of fact, I’d picked Fred up on a dig south of Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, Alberta. He’d been the only still-intact obsidian spear tip on site, and the site supervisor had taken pity on a poor overenthusiastic undergrad and let me keep my first find after we’d catalogued it. We’d been learning together ever since, Fred and I. We made a good team.


End file.
